Campaign 2012

Obama, Romney Court Young Voters in High-Stakes 'Dating Game'

Younger Americans shaped by recession and Washington gridlock are having trouble getting excited about the presidential candidates.

By Naureen Khan

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Anne Bright Holton, the wife of Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine, speaks with Obama for America volunteers manning a voter registration table at James Madison University in October.(Naureen Khan)

HARRISONBURG, Va. — Things in abundance on the campus of James Madison University: hooded sweatshirts, Greek letters, stress about midterms. Noticeably absent: a whole lot of buzz or anticipation about the presidential election.

Four years ago, young voters helped President Obama's campaign redraw the electoral map on its way to a decisive victory. If all under-30 voters had stayed home in 2008, Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia, all historically red states, would have remained in the Republican column. He didn’t necessarily need those states to get to the White House then, but he sure could use them now.

That year, voters ages 18 to 29 posted the third-highest turnout on record for young voters since the minimum age was lowered to 18 in 1972. And they favored Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain by a ratio of 2-to-1, a more lopsided result than for any presidential candidate in the last 30 years. The busy hubs of young-voter activity often were college campuses, where in states like North Carolina and Virginia, the atmosphere was electrified by the states' new status as battlegrounds and the chance that young voters to change history.

But four years later, not only are college voters less excited about Obama; there’s a deeper and broader disenchantment arising from the economic battering that they and their families took during the recession, the negative tenor of politics, and the paralysis in Washington.

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“It’s a very different world that these 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds have grown up with, with hyper-partisanship in Washington and the Great Recession, where they’re seeing their friends and family members lose their jobs—if they’re lucky. Some have lost homes,” says John Della Volpe, polling director at the Harvard Institute of Politics. “Their views of politics have been shaped more by that than the foreign-policy decisions made in the first part of the decade.”

All of that feeds into an alarming new dynamic: a complete lack of faith among the country’s youngest voting-age citizens in the ability of any elected leader to effect change. And that’s not good news for either the candidates or the nation. As JMU junior Hannah Cranston put it, “I don’t think a shift in presidents is going to change much. I don’t think one man can make all that much of a difference.”

A recent poll commissioned by Harvard’s Institute of Politics underscores Cranston’s sentiments: Nearly three-quarters of young people say they are not politically active, and four in 10 say it doesn’t matter who is elected because Washington is broken. A quarter believe that neither candidate represents their views.

Kelley Galownia, a 20-year-old junior here at JMU, is befuddled and turned off by the unrelenting volley of misleading attacks and counterattacks by both campaigns. The widespread misinformation makes it hard to know either candidate’s positions, she says. “Most people our age feel that both of them are pretty confusing in their views because they’ve been saying things that have been proven false,” she says. “It’s very frustrating.”

The search for a leader who inspires confidence is particularly difficult given the circumstances in which these young voters grew up. The diehards who were enchanted by Obama’s 2008 message have long since graduated, and what they found in the workforce wasn’t pretty. Unemployment among 18-to-29-year-olds stands at a dismal 12 percent, according to the most recent numbers provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you count the 1.7 million young adults who have given up on looking for work, the figure would jump to 16.5 percent.

At this four-year public university nestled in the picturesque Shenandoah Valley, undergraduates are well aware of the prospects they face when they go out into the world. They were teenagers when the economy cratered and it has lowered their expectations. “This is the first generation of college students that we’re aware that came of age in a recession,” said Ward Lee, JMU director of career services. “There’s a little bit more pessimism that they’ve learned to live with.”

The overwhelming sentiment among JMU students is that they will be holding their noses as they cast their votes, if they vote at all. Think of their conundrum like an episode of The Dating Game.

Bachelor No. 1 is the familiar face—the one they fell for hard last time around. But things didn’t turn out quite as well in that relationship as they might have hoped. Bachelor No. 1 seems to recognize his own failings, but is that enough to make up for his sizable lapses?

Bachelor No. 2 has been the guy in the wings. He’s a bit stiff, a bit awkward, and young people aren’t really sure whether they can really connect. He can be a little too old-school for their taste, and Bachelor No. 1 has done a pretty good hatchet job on his rep. But he’s hoping that he can win them over with assurances of his overall competence.

The trouble is, there are glaring incompatibilities with both of them—no matter where young voters are on the political spectrum.